From memory, I recall reading about Marc Antony and the poet, Cicero, proponent of the Roman Republic. After Cicero was murdered by Marc Antony’s men, Marc Antony had Cicero’s head and hands placed to the forum, as warning not to defy him even in oration.

The kind of phenomenon of not just silencing critics but internalized, forced, and deliberate willful ignorance and refusal to engage in reality or solutions outside one’s comfort zone is kind of reminiscent of historical records and analyses of failing societies.

The antagonisms of society are too transparent, and the language and ideology needed to challenge these class antagonisms have been abolished in the that it causes a sunk-cost fallacy into the liberal reformist parties that are only interested in cosmetic amelioration of social injustices, rather than their antecedent practices of significant, material, but incomplete policy amelioration.

The politics of self-preservation and comfort triumph over any desire to sacrifice that comfort for true social, economic, or political justice. We can’t have nice things because literal foot soldiers are in the way, public intellectuals divest people’s acceptance of legitimacy into direct action and destabilizing tactics: protests, blockades, strikes, and finally the political counter-ideology - which affirms that dignity of life and equality must be a material provision instead of rhetorical - to channel public outrage into political action and broad movements that scare the state into those reforms liberals adulate liberal democracy for. New Deal, Civil & Voting Rights, and Great Society were concessions, won through destabilizing events and movements, not merciful grants from on high seeing the plight of the poor.

Sympathy makes you a liberal, but because there is no feeling of shared destiny - solidarity - everything is up for compromise.

Which is why you have apologia for Manchin, the Democrats, Biden, Obama, et cetera.